I was 11 or 12 when I read my first Steve Gerber comic - a Man-Thing issue drawn by Jim Starlin.

I had read comics before that, but it was Gerber and Starlin who played a major part in converting me from a casual comics reader into an enthusiast.

In retrospect, I know, for example, that there were people fighting for creator's rights before Gerber's lawsuit against Marvel. But at the time, his work and his life were incredibly influential on me.

Steve Gerber was one of the writers whose work I always loved, despite the fact that I didn't know his name for the longest time. I was buying and loving back issues of his Defenders and Howard when I was a kid, but wasn't until later that I realized the same guy wrote both.

Steve had such a unique and unusual voice for mainstream comics. I don't think he ever really got the recognition as the singular talent that he was.

God damn it. I just bought a friend of mine his Foolkiller series not two days ago, and I only read Nevada for the first time last week. God damn it. I'm going to have a bourbon and read Howard the Duck #16. His family and friends have my sympathy.

I didn't know him more than passingly, but I did enjoy a lot of his work - starting back in high school in the 70s when I knew the books and characters, but didn't pay attention to writers and artists by name. I didn't connect those dots until college.

Back before everyone had the internet, Gerber ran a series of BBS systems (Gerber's Foolkiller series was the first to use a BBS as a plot device). In fact, once everyone had the WWW, local systems like his pretty much fizzled out.

On the last of them, Bingo Bango Bongo, I was an aspiring writer who managed to hang around far more famous and talented folks like Steven Grant, Mark Evanier, Joe Straczynski, and Gerber himself. I won a contest there during his run on She-Hulk, and he named a character after me - Prof. Brent Wilcox. The character shared the storyline with Howard The Duck, and I couldn't have been prouder. This has amused me for years... a strange sort of fame.

At the top of my "most influential writers" list are him and Alan Moore. Personally influential, that is. The guys who literally shaped me through their work. And if I really sat down and thought about it hard, Gerber would probably have been the one who most influenced my worldview.

He lived not five miles from me, and I know many people who knew him over the course of my life, but I never got to meet the man...

He died in a hospital a few blocks from my house.

While he was there, I would drive by the hospital every day and tell myself "You should go meet him." But the part of my mind that's been programmed by upbringing and society always kept me from doing it because it would have been improper and possibly awkward for him...